Sunday, May 01, 2016

The Craven Herald & Pioneer announces a programme of free events celebrating the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë in Lancashire:

Events will bring to life the places just over the border that inspired her writing, including the atmospheric village of Wycoller with its ruined hall – the real Ferndean Manor in Jane Eyre.
Pendle neighbours the Brontë moors, and so Pendle Council is launching a programme of 21 events from today until October 30 to mark the anniversary.
Pendle Council’s Brontë enthusiast, Sarah Lee, co-ordinated the programme, working with Pendle’s tourism officer, walk leaders, artists, photographers and storytellers to bring the area’s Brontë connections to life.
She said: “It’s often forgotten that Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne often walked across the border over the moors into Lancashire.
“Charlotte knew this area well, drawing inspiration from the landscape, turbulent histories, local news and Lancashire folklore.”
Tourism officer Mike Williams agreed, saying: “Pendle in Lancashire is little-known for its Brontë connections, but they are compelling.” (Daryl Ames)

They say it's grim up north - and this walk across the Yorkshire Moors does nothing to disprove the theory. The landscape might be uplifting, but the poets and novelists it has inspired were almost all gloom-mongers. Don’t say you weren’t warned...
We start at Haworth Parsonage – two centuries ago the home of the Brontës.
It was here Charlotte wrote the gloomily romantic Jane Eyre, Anne wrote the fierily feminist Agnes Grey, and the depressive Emily wrote the gothic nightmare that is Wuthering Heights.
Is it already time to do what Branwell, brother of the three sisters, did every night and slope off to the Black Bull for a gallon or two?
Not if you want to make it across the moors, it isn’t. So instead, make your way across to the church, next door to the Parsonage, and take the footpath that skirts the graveyard and leads on to the Brontë Way.
This takes you across Penistone Hill and on to Haworth Moor – the terrifyingly beautiful landscape that inspired Emily’s novel.
An hour or so in, just after joining the Pennine Way, you come to the ruins of Top Withens Farm – thought by many to be the inspiration for Wuthering Heights.
When the wind blows the trees (as it usually does here) you feel ‘the intense horror of nightmare’ as Cathy knocks at the window: ‘Let me in – let me in.’ And let me out of here! (Christopher Bray)

The Times is concerned about how much Jane Eyre should have paid in taxes today for her inheritance:

Reader, I married him, but Osborne clobbered me for £600,000Our great literary heroines and heroes are forever inheriting fortunes, but how much tax would they have to pay on them today?“‘Twenty thousand pounds?’ Here was a new stunner — I had been calculating on four or five thousand. This news actually took my breath for a moment.”So says Jane Eyre, the eponymous heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s debut novel, on learning she has inherited a fortune from her Uncle John. She is shocked that she alone will receive the full £20,000 but soon realises it will be a “grand boon”.An inheritance of £20,000 would still be a boon, but when Jane Eyre was published in 1847 it was a vast sum — equivalent to about £1.9m today. (Ruth Emery)

Roger McGough marks a series of poetic anniversaries with a programme on the theme of time, memory and remembrance. Shakespeare, of course, makes an appearance, as does Charlotte Brontë. It's also a century since the Easter Rising in Dublin inspired WB Yeats and others to put pen to paper. More reflections on time and memory come from poets including TS Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Producer Sally Heaven.

Women writers, especially, have tended to take on masculine-sounding names because they perceive a male bias among publishers and readers. Think of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), or the Brontë sisters who wrote first as Currer (Charlotte), Acton (Anne) and Ellis (Emily) Bell. But a famous and recent example of this is E.L. James, Erika Leonard in real life, who took on the gender neutral initials because she felt that Fifty Shades of Grey's sexual content would be better accepted coming from a male writer. (Gargi Gupta)